


A Short, Smart Smack

by Delphi



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Drama, Gen, Guardian-Ward Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-28
Updated: 2010-08-28
Packaged: 2017-10-11 07:10:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/109800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Delphi/pseuds/Delphi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When all else has faded, Argus still remembers his master's hands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Short, Smart Smack

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Kink Bingo 2010. Kink: _Smacking/Slapping_

His master had big hands. That's what he remembers about him now that time has scrubbed away all the particularities of Apollyon Pringle's face. All that's left in Argus's mind is the image of squinting blue eyes and brittle yellow-grey hair that might have once been the colour of straw. The man's mouth, though, his nose, his brow—these things are ghosts. They don't make portraits of caretakers, and who would have wanted to take the sour old bastard's photograph? But he remembers Old Apollyon's hands as clear as day: long, rawboned things with swollen red knuckles and calluses that could file down steel.

Old Apollyon wielded a cane like a shepherd with his crook. There's more than one boy who left the school with stripes carved into him for life, and there's one of them who stayed: all these years later, Argus has still got three long, faint scars on the backside of him from the time he shirked his work to run off on a London holiday when he was seventeen. When you got caned by Old Apollyon, you stayed caned.

It's his master's bare hands that he remembers most, though. Fingers pinching his ear and dragging him along through the corridors and passageways of the school like a dog at heel. Closed fists giving him a good clout in the kidneys when he wasn't where he was supposed to be, or wasn't getting there fast enough, or oughtn't to have been anywhere at all.

And then...well, here he goes and smiles, and his face nearly creaks with rust at the effort of it. He remembers the cuffs too, you see. Old Apollyon's open hand, and a smack on the back of the head that wasn't even a tenth as fast or as hard as it could have been. Just now and then, when the two of them had finished up a hard load of work and made a good showing of it, or on a quiet morning when Argus was bolting his post-patrol dinner while Old Apollyon squinted at the newspaper.

He doesn't remember the man's voice, but the grease-and-vinegar smell of those hands is marked as deep and thorough in his memory as the stripes are on his arse. He remembers the warmth of the old man's skin and the way the boy he'd been then had tried to hear all manner of things in a blow like that, tallied up and translated by how long the hand lingered.

'Good job,' maybe.

'All right.'

'There's a lad.'

He probably flinched the first time, or even the first twelve. Eventually, though, there was nothing in the world that gave him so warm a feeling in the belly as one of those cuffs. A rough wool sleeve brushing against his cheek. The brief, botherless sting. Always just hard enough to tap him out of bad thoughts. Always just hard enough that he might touch the spot after and still feel it, tender.

It's been forty years now since anyone has touched him, and still sometimes his hand creeps up...

Argus has himself an apprentice these days. The boy is a skinny little thing called Gilbert Gage, and he's mostly useless, but he's learning. Argus isn't really any good with him, but he's not allowed to send the boy back. He knows his work down in his bones, and in his muscles, and on his skin. It's just about impossible, isn't it, trying to teach that sort of thing to a little lad who only watches him with big dark eyes and tries clumsily to follow suit. They go for days, weeks maybe, without a word said, as Argus goes about his work and Gilbert follows along behind him like a shadow.

Sometimes, however, when the day has been long and the silence has got to be too much, Argus will reach over. His own hands are awkward, not at all as certain as Old Apollyon's were. He never did get any practice at beating boys. He grunts a faint sound of approval, though, and then delivers a short, half-smart smack to the back of the boy's head. If his hand lingers, he can even feel the warmth of him. The softness of his hair. The jolt of his surprise.

'Good job.'

And in time, he'll be damned if the boy doesn't learn to lean into it.


End file.
